I think even five or six years ago, digital marketing was much more about the scattershot approach, in which marketers tossed out a bunch of different strategies, waited to see which one would hit – and then aggressively pursued that strategy. But what happened was that the power of social media exploded in ways no one had predicted, and all of a sudden you had this massive platform that provided so much opportunity that it changed the digital marketing game.

So now it’s really about two things: identifying your target market and figuring out how to engage them on their home turf. For example, if your products and services are geared for Millennials, you can’t reach them on traditional advertising platforms such as TV and radio, you have to create smart and entertaining social media campaigns to draw their attention, because young consumers live on social media and are more apt to share brands they love on that platform.

I also think that one of the next frontiers of digital marketing is going to be personalizing the customer experience from acquisition to retention. What I mean is that the companies that will be successful, are those that make each customer feel validated, important and valued. How does a company do that? By soliciting opinions and reviews and encouraging interaction on social media from customers about how their products and services could be better. You can also establish a dedicated customer service platform on social media so that you can respond instantly to customer complaints and issues, and then when you resolve a problem, you can thank customers for their business, which can foster outstanding goodwill.

The future of digital marketing is going retro, because it’s going to be about how companies can satisfy the individual needs of consumers in a way that makes them feel important.

I don’t think there’s any magic formula to achieve success, but I do think that beginning your year by setting clear and measurable goals is the first step entrepreneurs should take. By mid to late December, I’m already thinking about what I want to achieve in the next calendar year, and by early January I’ve written down specific goals as well as milestones to reach per month, quarter and per year. I think breaking down your goals into mini-victories really helps keep you on track.

I also think it’s important to get rid of everything that didn’t work last year. I’m talking about technology apps, strategies…any tools you used that didn’t provide the results you wanted, get rid of them, and find something better. A lot of times, we get stuck into trying to use the same tired approach that didn’t work last year, and cross our fingers that this year will be different, but why would it?

Last, I think it’s important that business owners find leisure time to recharge their creativity and energy. Work is fulfilling, but enjoying life and gaining new experiences can only enhance your outlook and contribute positively to how you think about your company, so finding that work/life balance is essential.

One of the realities of being in the digital game these days is that one dissatisfied customer or client can wreak havoc on a company’s reputation. No doubt, you’ve used Google to check out reviews for a product or a service, and lo and behold, you get real – and sometimes even raw – feedback that immediately paints a picture of the company, fair or not.

Twitter has become the dominant social media platform for complaints, reviews and strong opinions, and as a business owner, you can either ignore it – at your own peril – or harness its power in a positive way. How?

First, assign a team member the task of monitoring your company’s social media accounts to ensure you are on top of all customer feedback.

Second, make sure you respond immediately to any and all feedback you receive on Twitter… especially if it’s negative. If you wait even for a half hour to respond, negative posts (depending on how damning they are) can worsen significantly.

When responding to negative posts, it’s important to respond in positive way that comforts and reassures the customer that you will find a solution to the problem. When you’re responding to something positive, make sure you thank people for the kind words and let them know that you appreciate them.

Third, encourage customers to post thoughts and reviews about your products on Twitter… and perhaps even more importantly, encourage them to reach you through Twitter’s Direct Message Feature – which is private – if they have an issue they want to discuss that may be sensitive.

Now, here’s one of the best parts about using Twitter as a customer service tool: it won’t cost you as much as setting up an entire call center, and it’s far more likely that customers whose problems have been resolved will tweet out accolades about how quickly you made things right. That means all your company’s Twitter followers will be more confident that your company cares about their needs, and it will increase your social care value, a huge measuring stick for customer retention.

One of the biggest problems for a start-up, or even a one-man operation, is simply finding the time to do everything that needs to be done. That moment where everything is done and it’s finally time to relax never seems to come.

While I may not be able to get you two weeks free to take a vacation next month, I can give you some tips that will help you handle your marketing in a more productive way, and at least get you on to the next entry in your never-ending to-do list. Following are a few quick and easy to implement ideas that will help with common marketing tasks.

Do Things In Batches

Rather than jumping from one thing to another and trying to get everything done just before you need it, do repetitive tasks in batches. For example, if you send out a weekly newsletter every Friday, schedule a day to do 3 or 4 all at once and you’ll be set for the entire month. You can do the same with things like social media posts. Spend two hours one morning putting together your posts and use a scheduler to post them. You won’t have to worry about them for the rest of the week.

Outsource Your Content

Hiring a writer to handle content creation for you will save a ton of time. Once you’ve got someone who creates quality content, you’ll be free to concentrate on distributing it and keeping your audience growing.

Take Advantage Of Open Source Content

Everything from articles to images and videos are available for public use. A quick search for “open source” or “public domain” will give you plenty of sites where you can find all kinds of content that’s free to use.

If you don’t have time to write or create something new every time, these sources can be a great way to keep your site and newsletters active. Going back to doing things in batches, you can even bookmark things you like and put together a few spare pieces to keep on hold for when you need them.

Use Templates

If you create a lot of similar types of content over and over, such as newsletters, make templates that you can follow. There’s no need to start from scratch every time. Especially if you stumble across a format that really works well, creating templates for different types of content can really speed up the creation process.

Automate What You Can

There seem to be new applications to automate different tasks popping up almost daily. Take advantage of things like email autoresponders and social media schedulers. Make good use of integration between applications too.

There are so many tools out there, it’s just impossible to list them all, but try searching for “top marketing apps” or “social media tools”, you’ll find plenty of articles that will show you how to take advantage of technology and rack up a little more free time on your schedule.

Work Smarter

It’s all about working smarter. Sometimes we lose site of the very technology that we’re working with. When you find yourself doing the same thing over and over and thinking, “There must be an easier way”, there probably is an easier way. In today’s marketing world, it is definitely possible to cut corners without sacrificing quality.

I never tire of walking my mother through the basics of the Internet. I set up her first email account five-ish years ago, showed her how to add friends on Facebook last Christmas, and changed her life by registering her for an Amazon Prime account a few months ago. I get a kick out of talking tech with her, and know that 9 times out of 10 the reason she’s calling me is to help troubleshoot her latest issue. So when my phone rang last night, I was none-too-surprised to hear that she had a question about “that Facebook thing.” Unbeknownst to her, my mom had stumbled on one of Facebook (and Google’s) most powerful business tools – remarketing pixels.

“HOW DO THEY KNOW WHAT I’M LOOKING AT?!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Facebook! I was just browsing on Nordstrom and when I logged into Facebook, the SAME DRESS I was looking at was in my news page!”

I giggled a bit to myself, at both my mom’s penchant for paranoia and her butchering of the term “newsfeed”, and began to explain how this miracle had occurred.

What she had observed was an incredibly sophisticated marketing tool in action. Facebook and Google have ingenious bits of code called “pixels” that allow website owners to track the actions users take on their sites, and to market to them based explicitly on these actions. If you’ve shopped online at some point, I’m sure you’ve had an experience similar to my mom’s: you look at a product on one site, only to see it reappear in the “sponsored ads” section of the next fifteen unrelated websites you visit. It’s unnerving at first, but as a business owner, I’m sure you can appreciate the genius of such campaigns. These companies know which products a visitor has expressed interest in, and pay for them to appear on the websites they visit until they cave and make a purchase. It’s brilliant, even if it does seem a bit invasive.

So how does it work?

Quite simply: by adding the snippets of code to your website. You implant them on your website, and the code does the rest. It can tell you who has viewed which pages, who has made a purchase, who hasn’t, which types of products they look at, etc. The information is aggregated on Facebook and Google, and you can use it to run highly targeted advertising campaigns. Instead of trying to win over “cold” leads, these pixels give you the opportunity to market towards people who are already aware of and interested in what you have to sell. In my mom’s case, Nordstrom used its pixels to determine that she was interested in buying one of their absurdly overpriced dresses, and marketed that very same dress to her on Facebook. I’m not sure whether or not she’ll end up buying it, but you can see why these campaigns are so prevalent and successful. They’re highly customized, and as such tend to provide a much better ROI than conventional marketing campaigns.

If your business has a website, you should be using these exact same tactics to advertise your products. These remarketing campaigns are powerful and cost-effective, and consistently yield impressive results. You can read up on how to set them up yourself, but if you want to really benefit from them you should consider consulting with a marketing professional. They’ll be able to build up robust advertising campaigns that are sure to make you money – and probably freak out a mom or two in the process.

This is a question that should be deeply engrained in the mind of every business owner because it’s what’s in the mind of anyone and everyone you want to sell something to. At the end of the day, what people REALLY want to know is why they should give their hard-earned money to your business.

How to Build a Responsive Mailing List

So, let’s take a step back for a minute and think about this for a minute.

We live in the age of Big Data, information overload and low boredom thresholds. You have to take advantage of the first, find a way through the second and avoid the third… otherwise, your cash register will never ring. And, if you’re not selling, you’ve got a MAJOR problem.

Smart business owners knows that postcard marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach their customers, but that it only works if you’re sending the right postcards to the right targets. And unless you’re going to carpet bomb an entire area with postcards addressed “to whom it may concern” – which, for the record, are two very bad ideas – you’re going to need a mailing list.

Actually no. Let’s take that one step further. You need a RESPONSIVE mailing list, because a list of names of people who are never going to respond is about as useful as having no mailing list at all.

Purchasing A Mailing List

Unlike buying an email marketing list, which is traditionally a big no-no because of the way email addresses are abused, the legal restrictions involved and the unwillingness of emailing companies and ISPs to handle anything where the addressee cannot be shown to have opted in, buying mailing lists for postcard marketing efforts is completely safe.

Before you think about buying a list, though, you have to decide who you want to be on it, which in turn means thinking about the types of people you want to contact.

Are they male or female?

Are they single, married or married with children?

How old are they?

Do they work?

What do they have in common?

Why should they be interested in hearing from you?

It’s important to develop personas for the people you’re trying to reach so that when you purchase your mailing list, it’s full of people who will actually have an interest in hearing from you.

Let’s take a look at a few practical examples…

Cruises for Senior Citizens

Say you’re a travel agent or a luxury cruise company and you’re introducing a new travel packages where you’ll fly customers to Rio and then take them slowly down the east coast of South America and on to New Zealand and South Africa. They’ll fly home from Auckland six weeks after leaving Rio. The trip includes an agenda full of lectures from historians and art experts.

Who is this going to appeal to? What do they have in common? They are:

Financially better off than most, because let’s face it, this vacation won’t be cheap

Almost certainly retired, since they’ll be away from home and out of contact for quite some time

Interested in history and/or art

In addition, they may be seasoned travellers and perhaps approaching a significant anniversary that they want to celebrate in a grandiose manner

Local family restaurant serving meals at competitive prices with a minimum of frills and an emphasis on healthy eating

Who is this going to appeal to? What do they have in common? They are most likely:

Either low to medium income earners, aficionados of healthy eating, or both

Young with families or senior citizens

Living – or working – nearby. This is not the type of restaurant people will travel a long way to visit.

Once you’ve come up with answers to questions that will help you hone-in on what your ideal target looks like, you now have enough information to carry out an intelligent search on a list-provider’s website. You can input parameters that, if the list provider is good enough, will return a list of targets that at a bare minimum, meet your basic criteria.

Building Your House List

Once you’ve fine-turned this list, you’ll have what’s known as an “outside list.” Your next goal is to build your “house list,” which is a list of people who have engaged with you at some level, whether it’s actually buying from you or merely asking you for more information.

Now this is where things get interesting, since how quickly you build your house list is ultimately going to depend on the success of your postcard marketing campaign. Here are a few key things to keep in mind to stack the cards in your favor:

Make a compelling offer

Provide a number of response channels: online, email, telephone and snail-mail

Split test everything

Personalize what you’re sending

This last one is a biggie. And here’s why…

Statistics have proven time and time again that by:

Addressing a recipient by name

Customizing the image and/or the message to be relevant only to that particular recipient

You can improve your response rates by 30% to 50%.

Our business is in helping businesses just like yours grow through responsive postcard marketing. Give us a call today and let’s discuss how we can (a) build the right list for your business and (b) design the postcard campaign to go with it.